Robotics

Why Value Outlasts Valuation

After a long innings in the technology industry and as an avid student of history, I have formed a simple personal thesis about technology that doesn’t change much, no matter the technology or era. Value (and values) always trump valuations. I have seen this play out time and time again, and I was reminded of this truism by a video I saw on the internet.

A few days ago, the internet lit up with viral videos of Neo, a humanoid housekeeper. The robotic helper is a project by a company called 1X Technologies. To gain attention in a crowded market for a questionable product category, a decade-old startup that began as Halodi Robotics took a gamble and gave The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern access to the robot. They knew even a moderately good review would be enough to achieve their near-term goal: to raise gobs of money from investors hoping to find a pot of gold in these robots.

The review

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Technology
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Field Notes. 07.17.2024

“In 2023, intense competition among over 100 LLMs has emerged in China, resulting in a significant waste of resources, particularly computing power. I’ve noticed that many people still primarily focus on foundational models. But I want to ask: How about real-world applications? Who has benefitted from them?”

Robin Li Yanhong, the founder and CEO of Baidu

On My Mind

Xiaomi recently showed off a factory run without humans that can produce 32 million phones a year. That got me wondering about China and robots — especially considering its population is set to contract. What I found was quite amazing. China clearly loves robotics more than other countries. 

“In 2022, 52% of all industrial robots in the world were installed in China, up from 14% a decade earlier,” according to a research report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank. No wonder the robotics sector is booming in China. The report notes that “since 2017, there have been over 3,400 robotics startups in China.”

The United States might have

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Technology
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Our Dystopian Now

Most of us often fear what we can’t see, understand or contextualize. The unknown is the biggest devil of them all. Throughout history we have had to contend with this — solar eclipses, epileptic fits and falling asteroids — they all became part of the fictional fear factor, that has plagued humanity. And perhaps that explains why it became fashionable to pontificate about our dystopian future. Rapid and whiplash-inducing changes in technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and bio-engineering have got dystopia on our minds.

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Musings
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Robot OS & the open source

SD Times interviews Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) that emerged from Willow Garage in 2012 about the future of robotics and why open source philosophy is the right step forward. He also shares his vision of the future. Add it to your “read it today” list. [SDTimes]

Musings
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The (New) Robot Reality

terminator-5-sarah-connor-actress
Last week Amazon revealed how it is using robots. Did the company divulge a secret lab where humanoid machines made out of steel are slowly plotting to take over the planet? Hardly. The 320-pound, orange automatons from Kiva Systems (which Amazon acquired in 2012) move high, heavy shelves full of products closer to human employees, speeding up the time it takes to dispatch goods to customers.

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